Léa Porré: Relics

Tache presents Relics, a solo exhibition of new and recent works by artist Léa Porré (b. 1996, France). Relics also marks the launch of t minus 1: a programme of installation-based projects in the gallery’s downstairs exhibition space.

Opening in parallel to Tache’s presentation of Porré’s work at the fourth edition of Minor Attractions, held across the street at The Newman, Relics realises an expansive encounter with Porré’s worldbuilding practice. Working across digital image generation, installation, sculpture, textile, and woodcraft, Porré constructs what she calls “fictional souvenirs”: objects and images that appear to have survived from an alternate time, distinct from the present reality in which they are viewed. Fed by a rich research practice, Porré extracts from the visual languages of heraldry, architecture and ornament, and from the social histories of folklore and ritual, to code a world of invented relics.

Relics brings together the sculptural installations Trophaeum, Arcadian Anomalies, Topia, and Corn Spirit. Forms drawn from antiquity and the earthly – gates, finials, shields, crops, trophies – are rendered in a celestial palette, appearing anew to us as the physical fragments of an imagined culture. Detached both in temporality and in their materiality from the systems that might once have explained them, they retain traces of the human activities of protection, authority, ceremony and commemoration.

Porré’s worldbuilding practice necessitates acts of physical fabrication: generated imagery fills windows framed by woodworked, forged and woven structures. In lieu of versimilitude, of enacting a faithful reconstruction of any particular past, Relics makes visible how the past is produced through inherited images, stories and symbols that are, and will continue to be, reshaped by memory.